Didier Robert de Vaugondy (1723-1786) was Royal Geographer and Censor in France (Tooley, 541). The Robert de Vaugondy family was descended from the Nicolas Sanson family and had much of his map plates. The family combined his plates with those of Hubert Jaillot’s plates after his death in 1712. Combining the map plates and thoroughly revising the earlier engravings, the family created the “Atlas Universal” (1750-1757) (Moreland and Bannister, 136). Didier’s work includes: “Mexico” (1749), “Maps in Atlas Universal” (1750-1757), “Nouvel Atlas portative” (1784), and “America Septentrionale” (1761). His atlases were later reissued by Delamarche (Tooley, 541).

These maps were first published in a 1777 supplement edition to Didier Robert de Vaugondy’s “Encyclopedie” (Phillips, 627, no. 1195). The top map based on the work of Philippe Buache is meant to contrast with the bottom map based on a Japanese chart brought to Hans Sloane by Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a German who spent time in the “open” port of Nagasaki during Japan’s isolationist period as part of his work for the Dutch East India Company (Moreland and Bannister, 269-70). Both maps provide a strange visual account of northwest North America. Buache’s map, for instance, shows a grossly misshapen Alaska and a large version of the mythical Sea of the West while the Japanese map shows Japan as incredibly large and quite close to North America. Buache’s map also shows the land of "Iesso" or "Yezo,” a place allegedly lying north of Japan. Later identified as Hokkaido, explorers in the seventeenth century were unsure of its nature. The Russians attempted to discern whether Yezo was indeed an island or part of Asia with a number of expeditions in the seventeenth century. Under the reign of Peter the Great, the explorers were able to chart Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands. In the 1780s, a French expedition sailed between Yezo and Korea, and then, through the Kuriles (Tooley and Bricker, 130).